Stand on the grassland of central Mongolia in January and the thermometer may read forty below. In summer the same plain turns green and endless, with almost no trees to break the wind. This is the eastern end of the Eurasian steppe, a belt of grassland running about 8,000 kilometers from Manchuria to Hungary. Farming was hard here. Grass was not. The people who lived on it turned grass into wealth the only way they could: through animals.
Life on the move
The Mongols and their neighbors were pastoral nomads, who moved their herds between seasonal pastures rather than living in fixed villages. A family might shift camp several times a year, following water and grass along routes its ancestors had used. Herds included sheep, goats, cattle, camels and above all horses. Animals supplied meat, milk, wool, felt, leather, dung for fuel and transport. The favorite drink, airag, was fermented mare's milk, and a household's wealth was counted in livestock.
Homes moved too. The ger, a round tent of felt stretched over a folding wooden lattice, could be taken down and loaded onto carts or camels in an hour or two. Russians later called it a yurt. Children learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk, and hunting on horseback with the short, powerful composite bow was both food gathering and military training. When a whole society spends its life in the saddle, nearly every adult man is already a cavalryman. That fact, more than any secret weapon, explains why steppe peoples so often defeated far larger settled states.
Empires before the Mongols
The Mongols were not the first to build a steppe empire. More than a thousand years earlier the Xiongnu confederation pressed Han China so hard that Chinese rulers paid them tribute in silk and sent princesses as brides. Later the Turks of the sixth century ruled from Manchuria to the Black Sea, and the Uyghurs held the eastern steppe in the eighth and ninth centuries. A pattern repeated: a gifted leader united quarrelsome tribes, the confederation drew wealth from farming neighbors, and then it broke apart after his death.
By the twelfth century the steppe's farming neighbors were themselves ruled partly by former nomads. The Khitan had founded the Liao dynasty in northern China, and in the 1120s they were overthrown by the Jurchen, a people from Manchuria who founded the Jin dynasty. The Jin kept the steppe divided on purpose, rewarding one tribe against another. The Mongolian plateau was a patchwork of rival groups: the Tatars in the east, the Kereyids in the center, the Naimans in the west, the Merkits in the north and the Mongols themselves along the Onon and Kherlen rivers. Raiding, feuds and shifting alliances were normal.
Clans, oaths and loyalty
Steppe society was built on lineage. People belonged to clans that claimed a common ancestor, and the Mongol origin legend traced noble families back to a blue-gray wolf and a fallow doe. But kinship was not the only glue. Two men could become anda, sworn brothers bound by an oath and an exchange of gifts, a tie sometimes valued above blood. A warrior could also become a nokor, a personal follower who left his own clan to serve a chosen leader. These voluntary bonds gave an ambitious man a way to build power outside the old family hierarchy, and they would matter enormously in the story to come.
How we know
The Mongols of the early thirteenth century had little writing of their own, so historians lean on a handful of sources, each with its own angle. The most important Mongol source is the Secret History of the Mongols, a chronicle for the khan's family, probably written between the 1220s and the 1250s; its exact date is debated. It tells Chinggis Khan's story with striking frankness, including his failures. Persian historians who served Mongol rulers add detail: Juvaini finished his history around 1260, and the vizier Rashid al-Din compiled a vast world history in the early 1300s. Both wrote for masters they could not afford to offend. Chinese records, Russian chronicles and the reports of European friars such as John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck fill in more. Many people who wrote about the Mongols had seen their own cities burned, and their numbers and judgments should be read with that in mind.
Worked example: reading a number
A Persian chronicler claims that a Mongol army killed over a million people at a single city. How should a student handle that? Start by asking who wrote it and why. The writer may have lived through the disaster or heard about it from survivors, so the horror is real. But medieval writers often used huge round numbers to express catastrophe, and the city in question may never have held a million people. A careful historian concludes that the massacre was probably very large, that the exact figure is unreliable, and that the source tells us as much about how the event was remembered as about what happened. That habit of reading every number with both seriousness and caution will serve you throughout this course.